An illustration of nerves in the brain based on data from magnetic resonance imaging.Credit: Thom Leach/Science Photo Library
Brain implants are beginning to help people with severe disabilities to speak and even sing in near-real time. Now, a company wants to read people’s minds and treat mental conditions without implanting electrodes deep into the brain by using ultrasound — high-frequency sound waves above the range of human hearing.
Merge Labs, which launched last month with only a vague description of its goals, is one of many companies in a booming brain–computer interface (BCI) market. What makes it stand out is US$252 million in investment from funders that include artificial-intelligence firm OpenAI, based in San Francisco, California. The start-up is being billed as a rival to Elon Musk’s Neuralink, which makes devices that detect and manipulate electrical activity in the brain and are already being trialled in patients.
Nature asked researchers who the people are behind Merge Labs and whether the company’s approach is based on solid science.
What is Merge Labs?
The for-profit company bills itself a research laboratory, rather than a firm focused on a rapid return on investment. It was spun out of the non-profit research organization Forest Neurotech, based in Los Angeles, California.
Merge Lab’s co-founders include three researchers: Forest Neurotech’s chief scientific officer Tyson Aflalo and chief executive Sumner Norman and Mikhail Shapiro, a BCI researcher at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and Forest Neurotech adviser. Other co-founders are tech entrepreneurs Alex Blania and Sandro Herbig and OpenAI’s chief executive Sam Altman.
How will the company’s approach to BCIs differ from Neuralink’s?
Merge Labs seems to be developing ultrasound techniques to both image and modulate brain activity. The approach aims to be much less invasive than Neuralink-style devices, because it inserts sensors either just underneath the skull or operates through a window in the bone, rather than deep in the brain. Whereas electrical devices are fixed and can interface only where electrodes are implanted, ultrasound waves can monitor very large areas of the brain and stimulate multiple sites, which could help to treat multifaceted disorders such as depression, says Elsa Fouragnan, a neuroscientist at the University of Plymouth, UK, who collaborates with Forest Neurotech. Like Neuralink, Merge Labs looks set to use AI to decode brain activity.
How does ultrasound interact with the brain?
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